Vasiliki Sarli

Vasiliki Sarli

General Director of HMSC and Chemical Biology Expert

Born in Athens, Dr. Vasiliki Sarli studied chemistry at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, where she graduated in 1998. In 1999 she received a scholarship from the Greek state Scholarship’s Foundation  in ‘Chemistry of Bioorganic and Pharmaceutical Products’ and obtained her PhD in organic synthesis in 2004 at the same university. She had a Post-Doc position at the Institute of Organic Chemistry within the University of Leipzig in Germany and worked as a Marie Curie fellow for Prof. Dr. A. Giannis group. There, she had the opportunity to enter the area of chemical biology working on the design and development of kinesin inhibitors as a visiting Scientist in EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) at the Spindle Dynamics research network. She also worked on the development of bioactive compounds such as kinase inhibitors as anticancer agents, the synthesis of compound libraries and the natural product cyclopamine.

In 2008, Dr Sarli returned to Aristotle University and she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. She has worked in the total synthesis of natural products such as (±)-marinopyrrole A, phaeosphaeride A and B, lynamicins and marineosins. In 2014, she guided a project for the development of DKK1/LRP6 interaction inhibitors as potential agents for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and related neurodegenerative tauopathies. Currently, her research besides the synthesis of small bioactive molecules, includes the synthesis of new drug conjugates based on azasteroids or peptides for targeted drug delivery in cancer therapy